Study Hacks

It’s easy to get locked into your desk chair for long periods of time. Here are some ways to make sure you take a little break from your study. Just don’t go too far in the other direction – you still gotta smash through that work! The best way to have a break is to…

Learn it now so you can be ready for the next one… if there is a next one. (Nah, there will be.) The eyes of the world have been on the USA’s election, and it hasn’t been the easiest thing to understand. For starters, it isn’t like you vote either Democrat or Republican, and whoever…

Rewarding yourself, or if we’re being more honest here – bribing yourself with snacks is a long-standing and reputable study hack. The idea is that after every paragraph or page you read, you will find a sour worm staring up into your tired eyes. You pick it up, dust the sugar off your stained-yellow textbook…

Learning is a tricky process with so many things to account for. It’s so easy to find yourself overwhelmed as you fumble your way through various textbooks, journals and crash course YouTube videos. You have things like time constraints to manage, resources to compete for and even biological issues such as The Forgetting Curve. While…

If you want to get things done, you have to close the curtains on the world (for a bit). You probably already know it’s really hard to get into the flow of study or work when your phone’s buzzing, people are calling your name and there’s a possum in the tree just outside your window…

You can make all the colour-coded calendars you want, but they’re useless if you don’t have the brainpower to study. Here are some ways to get the most from your energy levels for study success. Think of yourself as a smartphone with limited battery. Do you want to drain that thing with apps running in…

It’s just another way to unlock the secrets of your brain like a trophy. Or an achievement. Depends what platform you’re gaming on. Retrieval Practice is a fancy name for trying to remember everything you know about a topic. It’s a quietly effective way of strengthening your memories of that information, and it’s probably something…

How many times have you crammed for a test and remembered everything the next day? Never? This is because of The Forgetting Curve, which suggests that our brains have a strict “use it or lose it” policy to keeping knowledge in our skulls. What is this thing? The Forgetting Curve is a mathematical formula which…

Deliberate Practice is one of those things that seems obvious when you think about it, but really isn’t. First, you work out the specific areas in which you need improvement. Then you hammer out practice drills which push you past your comfort zone and encourage growth. Instead of simply doing or completing a practice activity…

High school can be tough, but having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, can introduce a whole new set of problems when you’re trying to get the grades you want. But guess what – it doesn’t have to be this way! Tip #1: Develop a good study routine When you have ADHD, it can be hard to…

Unless you’ve got a good reason, you can’t do your exams with a keyboard. It’s kinda ridiculous in this day and age. When you sit down to do your HSC exams, you’ll have to make use of a skill that nobody uses much anymore – writing with a pen or pencil like we’re living in…

Waves come in many forms: light, sound, water, hairstyle… but in a Physics sense, they all behave the same way under different circumstances. Here’s a look at how waves react when they’re faced with these situations. You can see how some of them work by playing with a torch or in the bath. (Please don’t…

Get on the same wavelength as this common phenomenon. Some concepts in physics are hard to get your head around, but this isn’t one of those cases because almost everybody has experienced that weird thing where an ambulance siren seems to change as the vehicle passes you. Same with motorbike engine noise and someone yodelling…

Okay, maybe not allllll about it. But some stuff. About it. Your Scientific Research Portfolio. When you’re smashing through your Scientific Research Report, you have to back it up with a special portfolio, too. It’s there to support and guide the development of the main event, helping you keep a record of all your processes,…

There are around 500 hunks of rock in the Milky Way that have potential, you know… For next time you’re looking up at the stars, thinking about all the planets hurtling around them and what might be out there living its best life far far away from us, here are some sciencey facts to back…

Which algorithm should you use to find the minimum spanning tree? Let’s find out! When it comes to Networks, one of the mad skills you’re going to acquire this year is determining the minimum spanning tree of a given network with weighted edges. There are two strong algorithms battling it out for supremacy in this…

Let’s take a deep dive dowwwwn tooooo the deeeeeep… These days if you’re planning to get all science-like in your Year 11 and/or Year 12 scenarios, you’re going to be devoting a fair portion of your time to a Depth Study, which is so important it gets two capital letters. Depth. Study. So anyway, a…

When traditional knowledge meets cutting-edge science, deliciousness results… Connection with culture comes in many forms, and there’s possibly no better way to get in touch with your heritage than through your stomach. The Grasses for Grains project has been running for a few years now, with some exciting opportunities for the way we farm. And…

Medicine versus bacteria is an arms race. You know the old saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”? That’s especially true for bacteria. Whenever you’re sick and the doctor gives you a dose of antibiotics to fight off the tiny baddies inside your body, there are survivors. And they become antibiotic-resistant. In gaming terms,…

Something’s gone wrong… but what? And where? And… who? No, not who. You’re there in your fancy lab coat, with your fancy steampunk goggles and beakers filled with a bubbling rainbow of liquids. It’s sciencing time! But no matter what kind of experiment you’re running in your dungeon lab, you need to keep a googled…